...Communicating visually is one of the most effective ways to explain complex concepts and relationships, and can be a great way to explain your services/products and create valuable site content. I often use diagrams and whiteboarding in order to communicate new features and concepts internally with my team.

I've compiled a list of tools you can use to create visualizations, or simply use to communicate visually with your teammates....

Joe Flacco may have won the Super Bowl MVP award, but the onus is on his surrounding PR staff to make his procession of media interviews pop.

...However, his father, Steve Flacco, told The New York Times: “Joe is dull. As dull as he is portrayed in the media, he’s that dull. He is dull.” And while Flacco may have been in the Ravens' trainers' hands all season, his efforts under the white-hot lights of the media now put him in the PR department's hands.

These are some great tips for anyone working with athletes in the media or in other aspects of PR and marketing. As athletes make dozens of appearances each year, it's important to make them feel like a normal person and not like they're being attacked by a huge fan.

Let’s start with a test: type Coca Cola into the magic Google form. The results are just a calibrated mix of brand websites and PR initiatives such as micro-sites, social media accounts, news, images and videos.

One new feature you might notice however, is the latest introductions to Google+ – the authorship mark-up. Among its functions as a social media platform, is that the authorship system makes it possible to connect online journalists’ Google+ profiles into their published articles.

In turn it provides journalists with abnormal ranking power for articles they are signing off on, using their Google+ profile These can quickly build up ranking levels proportionally to the importance of their publishers and to the number of people in their Google+ circles. Journalists with a high number of Google+ followers are gaining huge visibility online and their articles can jump straight....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

A very useful social media strategy to consider when managing online reputation.

Atlanta Middle Schools did an excellent job at updating the public, via Twitter, during their January 2013 school shooting. Learn from their example here. Last Thursday, January 31st 2013, there was another shooting outside a middle school in Atlanta. A 14 year-old student was grazed by a bullet, and thankfully the wounds suffered were not life-threatening. Within minutes of the shooting, the shooter was disarmed and taken into custody. You can learn more about the shooting here. What truly impressed me about this crisis was the way Atlanta Public Schools leveraged Twitter to keep parents and the public informed. From their twitter handle, @apsupdate, Atlanta Public Schools...

Part of being an employee means that you’re expected to show up on time, dress neatly and use your skills and abilities to make a meaningful contribution to the company that pays your salary, which in turn, allows you to lead the life that you do everyday and not end up on the street. To increase the quality of that life (and your distance from the street), you need to constantly be learning, developing efficiencies that allow you to do more in less time, so that you can take on more responsibility and get paid more by your employer. Simple enough right? No, but here are five apps to help you become more productive...

Jeff Domansky's insight:

I can vouch for each of these five tools. I use them all. Think about adding them to your smartphone and tablet as well has your desktop for complete efficiency...

I’m really not a fan of the phrase: “you have a problem in social media”. It’s a phrase the online industry uses to describe companies who are having a rough time in the social space and, while it’s superficially accurate, it’s entirely misleading in its simplicity. The phrase is misleading because it speaks to the social media outcome and not the business issue that caused the problem.

This ascribes the blame to the wrong party and the ensuing remedies are then applied in the wrong areas. It’s not a new phenomenon, treating the symptom instead of the cause, yet the mistake continues to be made. You don’t have a reputation problem — the actual problem likely lies somewhere in your product, your business processes or your service delivery....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

This really thoughtful post gets at the heart of the online crisis management challenge.

I must have heard the words "we need to create a strategic plan" at least an order of magnitude more times than I have heard "we need to create a strategy."

This is because most people see strategy as an exercise in producing a planning document. In this conception, strategy is manifested as a long list of initiatives with timeframes associated and resources assigned. Somewhat intriguingly, at least to me, the initiatives are themselves often called "strategies." That is, each different initiative is a strategy and the plan is an organized list of the strategies.

But how does a strategic plan of this sort differ from a budget? Many people with whom I work find it hard to distinguish between the two and wonder why a company needs to have both. And I think they are right to wonder. The vast majority of strategic plans that I have seen over 30 years of working in the strategy realm are simply budgets with lots of explanatory words attached....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

This post is a must-read for PR, marketing and corporate communication strategists.

As a large proponent of Twitter marketing for businesses, I say this with a slight bit of shame: I hate #FollowFriday. Not because I don’t like the concept or the positive nature (I love both), I feel like it’s become a painful chore that actually does nothing for the people I want to shine a light on.

There is a good chance that I’m alone on this but I wanted to bring it up because I’ve been wondering who feels the same way. Our article “The How & Why of #FollowFriday On Twitter” was one of the top 10 popular blogs on the site last year and although I stand by the best practices I outlined in it, I can’t help but wonder…how many #FollowFriday shout outs actually turn into something relevant for businesses?...

Jeff Domansky's insight:

Here's a useful discussion about twitter best practices, preferences and social media customs that sometimes need a second look.

If you really want to connect with your customers, skip the product demos and tell them a story, one that they can relate to. Online video has the potential to be a powerful tool — but you have to know how to use it to get maximum results. For the most impact, you have to strike an emotional chord with your audience. Storytelling is a great way to do that. Here’s why visual stories make the difference....

For those who are technically challenged like myself, navigating Google Analytics beyond the standard data can be an exercise in futility or frustration. Take your pick. Adam Singer at Google makes it easy to capture your blog’s most popular posts of the year with a custom report you can find in a December post. When I initially came across Adam’s report, I thought, “What’s the big deal? I can do this by simply setting the timeframe from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2012 and pulling up the most viewed content.” Then I realized you need a little “magic” to strip out the posts published prior to 2012 to generate the following Top 10 list from last year....

This is a collection of the most popular posters right now. I personally love posters and have a few movie-sized framed. If you like posters as much as me, you should really have a look at these 30. There are some really amazing artworks out there that’s been printed on posters. I think it’s really great of the artists to allow it, because they allow people without thousands of dollars to buy art.

You can get a poster for $10 and up, however I’ve seen an old and rare poster go for a cool $690,000, but I think that’s outside our price range. That expensive poster was painted by a German artist by the name Heinz Schulz-Neudamm, he made it to promote the release of Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking 1927 film about a dystopian future in the year 2000....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

Creative with your coffee... I insist. Take a break and enjoy the incredible creativity of these posters...

Like everything else in social media, Facebook is ever-changing and evolving. In order to ensure your business doesn’t miss out on a great opportunity, it’s important that it closely watches social media for changes that may create new marketing opportunities. One of those opportunities, Facebook Graph Search, is currently in limited release. However, this new change to Facebook holds some definite promise for helping businesses boost their reach via this social media platform....

Video marketing thrives when companies use native ad tools to host content on their own websites.

...Content and video marketing help brands createunique online experiences for their prospective and current customers. When organizations host a variety of media on their corporate websites, they pull viewers in and extend the time they have to communicate value propositions. Moving forward, video content may drive the most on-site conversions.

A while back, I wrote about the best social media management tools for small business owners. I researched and reviewed a handful of the least expensive, most versatile options, but the comments included some lesser-known alternatives that seemed worth investigating.

I’ve taken some time to check them out, using the same parameters I used to gauge the initial set of tools. To restate, any tool considered must enable you to:

Content curation involves the added value only people can provide in the form of unique taste and understanding of the target audience to select and convert selected information into a quality content offering.

Content curation involves the added value only people can provide in the form of unique taste and understanding of the target audience to select and convert selected information into a quality content offering. It highlights other people’s content as well as your organization’s older content in the context of your brand to support your marketing and business objectives.

7 Ways to curate other people’ content

Here are seven ways to curate other people’s content presenting the information in a way that highlights your brand and point of view to attract your audience....

It is understandable that publishers want to take what works in one medium and replicate it as closely as possible on another and then hope to duplicate the business model minus a good chunk of the costs. But it is a strategy unlikely to be successful because it takes an antiquated view of our reading behaviour, namely insisting the magazine formatted reading experience is as relevant as it was 15 years ago when clearly it is not.

Take the research coming out of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, a collaboration with The Economist Group, which shows that while 77% of tablet owners use their tablet daily, and 53% read news on their tablet every day, only 14% have paid for content on their tablet....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

Sometimes, a tablet is a tablet, not a magazine... That's an important lesson for old-school publishers to remember.

When Twitter announced that it would be introducing the ability to embed tweets in late in 2011, it made a whole load of people’s lives easier, especially in the blogging and online publishing worlds. Now it’s announced an update to the feature that it says will make embedded tweets appear more like they do on Twitter. It also claims that the updates will make embedded Tweets “more engaging, useful and fast”. In trying to make the feature more engaging, Twitter has tweaked embedded tweets to display photos, videos, article summaries and other content shared in a tweet. You can also view retweet and favorite counts to better understand engagement. It also claims that they are now easier to read, although we’ve never really had any trouble on that front....

If you follow a large amount of people on Twitter it can be hard to keep tabs of Tweets on important topics. Tweetdig lets you filter Twitter by topic, user and more... like me you follow a massive amount of people on Twitter it can be hard to keep tabs of Tweets on topics that you don’t want to miss. Twitter itself offers us lots of tools to help us mange our feeds, lists have become indispensable for me as have saved advanced searches. I use Hootsuite to manage my Twitter feed and this also gives me lots of options including search and list columns.

Tweetdig however does do something a little different with your searches, giving you an easy way to stay on top of news stories, users and more. By creating filters you can easily keep up with the latest news as it breaks. For example this morning there is lots of talk about the Superbowl last night both from a sports perspective and an advertising/social media perspective. If I want to keep tabs on this I can easily create a filter within Tweetdig....

Lessons learned from Oreo on how improvisation, combined with Big Data, can cut through the media clutter. While there will always be debate about which TV spots deliver the most ROI, one thing is certain: no matter how much you've planned ahead, and no matter how deeply integrated your campaign may be, there's no better (or cheaper) way to cut through the clutter than to improvise.

The idea of improvisational marketing is a dangerous one to many of the big brands that advertise around the Super Bowl, for obvious reasons. Even the slightest misstep or off-color remark can go viral and forever damage a brand within minutes. But responding to events in real-time, as they unfold, and weaving your brand into the conversation in a way that entertains and supports your brand proposition, can be the most powerful marketing of all. Sunday's power outage provided the perfect surprise for brands to pounce on creatively.

Tide shrewdly tweeted, "We can't get your #blackout. But we can get your stains out." In a dig at their luxury car rival, Audi tweeted, "Sending some LEDs to the @MBUSA Superdome right now..." At Mondelēz International, our Oreo brand team and their agency partners sat together in a war room and came up with this gem, which has since been re-tweeted more than 15,000 times....

In my previous post, I discussed four steps agency owners and leaders can take to kick 2013 into action. One of them was to have a written plan to generate more business. I’ll expand on that today, because I believe it’s one of these leaders’ most important responsibilities. I recommend the following four preliminary steps to reach your agency’s 2013 fee income growth goals....

The entrepreneur’s challenge is to effectively communicate their value proposition, not only to customers, but also to vendors, partners, investors, and their own team.

Especially for technical founders, this is normally all about presenting impressive facts. But in reality facts only go so far. Stories often work better, because humans don’t always make rational decisions. Most people care the most about the things that touch, move, and inspire them. They make decisions based on emotion, and then look for the facts that support these decisions.

Thus, it behooves every entrepreneur to learn how to craft stories from their personal experience and the world at large that make an emotional connection, as well as tie in the facts....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

In my experience, the best leaders are usually the best communicators...

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.